I’m guessing at one point or another every reader of this blog will have heard this old saw:
If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never meant to be.
Either you heard it from your 8th grade girlfriend or maybe in a really old episode of Sex In The City – but you’ve heard it. It’s cheesy. It’s easy to remember. It’s really not all that good if you think about it. And in most cases it is just flat out wrong. It never was yours to begin with and even if it comes back it still isn’t yours.
Still – it did come to mind the other day after a conversation I had with a COO of a company. He had mentioned that corporate culture was something that kept him up at night. He said his company had a great culture and he worried about how to maintain it and grow it. From the way he was talking I could tell that he saw managing the company culture as his job – his responsibility.
And many, many enlightened top level executives, like this guy, truly care and worry about company culture. They Know –with a capital “K” that culture is the true differentiator that will carry a company to long-term success.
What they don’t know is that culture really isn’t their responsibility.
Culture – by definition – is the sum total of shared behaviors, beliefs, traditions, symbols and actions.
Shared.
When it comes to culture we’re all in this together.
Company Culture is a Distributed Function – Not a Centralized One (Click here if you’d like to tweet that.)
The answer is to let it go. Distribute the “culture load” to the organization.
How to do that? Simple…
Identify what behaviors, actions, outcomes, processes and ideals describe and depict the culture – paint a picture of it.
Communicate that picture.
Model the behaviors the culture inspires.
Reward the culture as it happens.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
What you do, say, reward and recognize are the manifestations of a culture.
And that cannot be held by one person. Culture – as we have already said – is what appears when EVERYONE is in the loop – not just the COO.
Don’t lay culture at the feet of a single person or even a single department (no – it isn’t HR’s job!)
Corporate culture is a WE outcome driven by thousands of individual ME actions. (Click here if you’d like to tweet that.)
If you want a great culture – let it go. If you have a good culture it will grow and thrive.
If you have a crappy culture, don’t worry, it’s not going to be big problem for long anyway. And you might think about getting that resume up to date.
Not as catchy as the saying I started this post with – but a #fact nonetheless.
via Symbolist.
Let Go of Corporate Culture
